Tang is a professor in the Department of Psychology, Presidential Endowed Chair in
Neuroscience and director of Texas Tech's Neuroimaging Institute.

A Texas Tech scientist studying the Chinese mindfulness meditation known as integrative
body-mind training (IBMT) said he and other researchers have confirmed and expanded
on changes in structural efficiency of white matter in the brain that can be related
to positive behavioral changes in subjects practicing the technique for a month and
a minimum of 11 hours total.

In a paper appearing in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists Yi-Yuan Tang of Texas Tech and Michael Posner of the University of Oregon (UO) reported improved
mood changes coincided with increased brain-signaling connections. They also found
an expansion of myelin, the protective fatty tissue that surrounds the nerves, in
the brain’s anterior cingulate region.

Deficits in activation for this area of the brain have been associated with attention
deficit disorder, dementia, depression, schizophrenia and many other disorders, said
Tang, who is now the director of Texas Tech’s Neuroimaging Institute and holder of the Presidential Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and professor in the
Department of Psychology.

“When we got the results, we all got very excited because all of the other training
exercises, like working-memory training or computer-based training, only have been
shown to change myelination,” Tang said. “We believe these changes may be reflective
of the time of training involved in IBMT. We found a different pattern of neural plasticity
induced by the training.”

IBMT was adapted from traditional Chinese medicine in the 1990s in China, where it
is practiced by thousands of people. It differs from other forms of meditation because
it depends heavily on the inducement of a high degree of awareness and balance of
the body, mind and environment. The meditation state is facilitated through training
and trainer-group dynamics, harmony and resonance.

In 2010, research led by Tang, then a visiting research professor at the University
of Oregon, and Michael I. Posner, professor of psychology at UO, first reported positive
structural changes in brain connectivity, based on functional magnetic resonance imaging,
that correlated to behavioral regulation. The study was done at the Robert and Beverly
Lewis Center for Neuroimaging with 45 participating UO undergraduate students.

More Detailed Findings

The new findings came from additional scrutiny of the 2010 study and another that
involved 68 undergraduate students at China’s Dalian University of Technology. The
researchers revisited data obtained from using an MRI technique known as diffusion
tensor imaging. The research team found improved density of the nerves involved in
brain connections but no change in myelin formation after two weeks.

After a month, or about 11 hours of IBMT, both increases in nerve density and myelin
formation were found as measured by fractional anisotropy, axial diffusivity and radial
diffusivity – the important indexes for measuring the integrity of white matter fibers.

This dynamic pattern of white matter change involving the anterior cingulate cortex,
a part of the brain network related to self-regulation, could provide a means for
intervention to improve or prevent mental disorders. (Click to enlarge.)

This dynamic pattern of white matter change involving the anterior cingulate cortex,
a part of the brain network related to self-regulation, could provide a means for
intervention to improve or prevent mental disorders.

“This study gives us a much more detailed picture of what it is that is actually changing,”
Posner said. “We did confirm the exact locations of the white-matter changes that
we had found previously. And now we show that both myelination and axon density are
improving. The order of changes we found may be similar to changes found during brain
development in early childhood, allowing a new way to reveal how such changes might
influence emotional and cognitive development.”

The improved mood changes noted in this and earlier studies are based on self-ratings
of subjects based on a standard six-dimensional mood-state measure, Tang said.

Both researchers first reported findings related to IBMT in 2007, also in PNAS. They
found that doing IBMT for five days prior to a mental math test led to low levels
of the stress hormone cortisol among Chinese students. The experimental group also
showed lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue than students in a relaxation
control group.

In 2009 in PNAS, Tang and his Chinese colleagues, with assistance from Posner and
UO psychology professor Mary K. Rothbart, found that IBMT subjects in China had increased
blood flow in the right anterior cingulate cortex after receiving training for 20
minutes a day over five days. Compared with the relaxation group, IBMT subjects also
had lower heart rates and skin conductance responses, increased belly breathing amplitude
and decreased chest respiration rates.

China’s National Basic Research Program, the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the
Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National
Institutes of Health (R21DA030066) supported the new research. Co-authors of the research
included Qilin Lu of Dalian University of Technology, Ming Fang of the Institute of
Basic Medical Sciences in Beijing, China, and Yihong Yang of the National Institute
on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Md.